Books, authors and all things bookish

Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of "The Fortress of Solitude" and "Motherless Brooklyn," comes to the L.A. Central Library on Tuesday night -- although there are no more tickets available, last-minute seats often open up at the ALOUD series. He'll be reading from and discussing his new novel, "Chronic City" which our reviewer described this way:

As "Chronic City" opens, Chase [Insteadman] visits the office of the Criterion
Collection to record a DVD voice-over. There, he meets Perkus Tooth, a
frantic, ageless scribbler in the spirit of Joe Gould. Perkus, who
invades Criterion to write DVD liner notes on spec, is an avid
collector of the esoteric cult item. In a rent-controlled Upper East
Side apartment he shares with pot smoke and coffee grounds, he tries to
gather "ellipsistic knowledge," reconstructing epiphanies through
forgotten jazz records and dubbed VHS tapes, attempting to prove that
"the horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream -- below it lay
everything that mattered."...

Some of Perkus' stoned paranoiac revelations are mind-expanding, while
others taper off into a deserved oblivion. But it's hard to remain
unsusceptible to his euphoria, especially when he spouts brilliant
mini-essays such as one calling Brando "the living avatar of the
unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our
murdered era."

Lethem told Jacket Copy more about Brando, about characters who smoke a lot of pot, Los Angeles, a marathon New York City reading and how much "Chronic City" can contain.

Jacket Copy: Your last novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” was set in Los Angeles. Did you spend any time out here when you were working on it?

Jonathan Lethem: Oh yeah, definitely. It was a period when I was traveling there, sporadically, a lot. A couple of different times I spent a month or six weeks. I like L.A., I’m very interested in it. I have, also, some kind of typical New York resistance to it. But I’m not 100% naive about California – I lived in the Bay Area for about 10 years. In a weird way, have two different layers of not being from L.A. As you know, the whole Bay Area-LA split is very strong too, in a different way. I’ve always been very interested in L.A., and I was writing about it out of a real affection in that book.

JC: You've said that you like surprising yourself as a writer, that
"You Don't Love Me Yet" set up different challenges for you. Did you find new opportunities working on "Chronic City"?

JL:
I'm immensely proud of this book, and I would say that it was a
deliberate and controlled book for me. I really felt like, once I
created the voice, I was writing something very strong in my work, that
I'd worked towards for a long time. But there were also things that
were completely new to me. A novel is too extensive an artifact to all
be planned. You have to be improvising, and you have to surprise
yourself. I prefer it that way -- it gives the thing more life. Those
fugue sections, where Chase looks out the window and thinks about the
birds and the tower – that was a surprise to me. I thought I was going
to write a book that was all velocity, kind of like 'Motherless Brooklyn
Part Two,' just Perkus running amok. Then Chase deepened for me, and
that was very very rewarding. Those points where the book stops the
velocity, and he just is experiencing, abiding with the strange
juncture he's come to in his life. Those are very meaningful to me, and
I might almost say they're my favorite parts of the book.

JC: In "Chronic City," Perkus becomes something of a mentor to Chase Insteadman.

JL:
When he meets Chase, he wants to bring him up to speed on stuff.
That part of him is very strongly connected to a relationship that was
very important in my life, with a slightly tragic but also very
wonderful, reclusive music writer named Paul Nelson who I made friends
with in my 20s. Paul – he didn't resemble Perkus in his manic
energies, and he wasn't a pothead and he wasn't a dandy – he was
Perkus' opposite in lots of ways.

I was quite naive about certain parts of culture and Paul educated me
all in a hurry. He made sure I understood that I had to learn about
Howard Hawks and Ross McDonald and Chet Baker and a whole lot of other
stuff. He opened a lot of doors for me, and that part of Perkus is a
bit of a portrait of what it was like to sit at Paul's feet.

JC: I think one of the pleasures of reading your book is that
experience of being culturally curated by the mind of Perkus Tooth. I
wonder if that hands-on mentorship is something that is a little bit lost to
this next generation, which has this vast electronic cultural curator.

JL:
It is really different. You used to have to really excavate the
past of American popular culture. It wasn't like there was this
gigantic repository at your fingertips. When Paul Nelson wanted me to
understand what was so important about an old black and white movie,
like "Only Angels Have Wings" by Howard Hawks, he would dig out these
VHS tapes he'd dubbed off the "Million Dollar Movie" or PBS, they'd have
the commercials intact -- it was this rare essence.

There wasn't a Criterion Collection, and there wasn't an Internet, so
most things just vanished. Most people that held onto them, it was some
esoteric pursuit to keep things alive. If you ran across a back issue
of some old zine – it wasn't like blogs, where they all just sit there
forever – you'd find some fading mimeographed zine and it would be a
window, a portal into some lost moment of popular culture.

JL: That piece is a little sleight-of-hand. I was really writing
about Mingus Root, from "Fortress of Solitude," and about having
created a character that some people I knew identified with so
strongly, and rightly – they were right to do it. Sometimes nonfiction
is boring, and I sometimes respond to opportunities to write essays by
writing slightly fictionalized versions of essays instead. By using the
name of a character that nobody had actually encountered yet, I was
turning that piece into a short story about a writer writing an essay
about writing about a character. It made it more of a living piece for
me.

JC: At the time, did Perkus Tooth just vaguely rhyme with Mingus Root? Was he a character you'd already begun to construct?

JL: He's been a character that's been coming for me for a long
time. He existed in my mind for a long while before I had a book that
could be a container for him. I had a lot of suspicions that he would
get a large place in a book of his own, and in a flash in 2004, it was,
I began to realize that I had this Upper East Side Manhattan book in
me. I could see this version of the city that I wanted to write about,
and I realized that was going to be Perkus' home.

JC: Perkus' obsessions are so pot-fueled.

JL: I guess some
people feel that they can't see through all that haze. It's really just
a life habit. I think I say in the first chapter that it's as much cups
of coffee as it is pot. I've known people, and gone through times in my
life, when smoking pot wasn't a remarkable choice, it was just daily
fuel, fuel for conversation. I was in some ways trying to treat it as
casually as that, but it's not as common as it used to be.

JC:
In some ways, you're working with layers of reality like Philip K. Dick
did, and the pot sort of enable that, an adjustment off what is
immediately perceived or regular. But do you think it's hard for people
to take literature seriously when it includes drug-taking?

JL: There's
a certain amount of middle-class culture that's very anxious about
signifiers of seriousness in general. It's not something that's very
personal to my book or me, in any particular way. It's the same kind of
pushback that the people who wrote about rock 'n' roll seriously in the '60s encountered. Because it was as though they weren't supposed to
write about that, as though that stuff wasn't culture, it was beneath
consideration. I think people who portray the life of American
vernacular culture – I've been that person, when I wrote about graffiti
or rap in "Fortress of Solitude," and I guess in a funny way, I've
stumbled into that situation in what you're proposing – but it's not
very important. That resistance is not a very deep response to what
I've done, or what anyone's doing. It's just a habit of reaction: Oh,
this can't be serious because it's about unserious people, or unserious
things. But that's not a very striking thing to even worry about.

JC: It's clear, because so much of the narrative is told from
Chase's perspective, what Chase gets out of his friendship with Perkus.
But what does Perkus get from Chase?

JL: First of all, Chase is
attractive – there's this sense in which anyone wants to be around him,
in the most common denominator, human way. There are those people. I
think Perkus has his own very strange ways of being motivated and
compelled by Chase – he's flabbergasted and entranced by the idea of
this unanchored, floating-through-life – it's the life that Perkus
could never even dream of obtaining for himself. And since he believes
that the world is treacherously corrupt – although he can't pinpoint
exactly how – the idea that someone can be so benign and float through
such treachery is very alluring and fascinating. Also, if you read the
first couple of chapters carefully, you cans see that Perkus, who
believes himself a kind of detective, regards Chase as a kind of
suspect. He's thinking that maybe this guy is much more than he seems,
much more deeply implicated or much more deeply aware of what Perkus
regards as the true nature of reality. So he's keeping an eye on him;
he wants to know what he's made of. Also – he needs listeners. Not
everyone sticks around. Let's not underestimate Perkus' neediness
either. All of those together, which contradict each other but that can
be true in our relationships – we can have contradictory motives that
pile up in the same direction.

JC: The idea of the book being very dense and controlled, that comes
across. How do you write, and what's your editing process like?

JL:
Writing every day is my only important form of – I always hate the
word "discipline," I try to get around it. "Habituation" is much more
how it feels to me. I love to dwell in the space of a novel -- I don't
find writing uncomfortable, it's something I really love doing. Writing
a long novel, especially, it means that I'm creating this whole other
set of people that I'm interested in, and this whole other world I get
to go into, and I try to stay there. I try to go every day, not just to
see the word count amass, which is helpful, but because then my
subconscious is kind of living there. If I write every day, even if
it's just a tiny bit – sometimes it will be just a tiny bit, I'll work
for 45 minutes and just check in with it – then I never stop, I'm
always immersed. That seems to me to be the best way to do things. Then
your unconscious process begins collecting happy accidents, everything
seems to be relevant to what you're working on, because your brain is
just harvesting language and incidents and images on its own. There was
one period at the peak with "Chronic City" where I worked on this book
without missing a day for over seven months. I always feel very smug
about those kind of runs when I get on them. I'm not that fast a
writer, so I have to be there every day to write a long book quickly at
all. I don't count words or pages. If I get a great paragraph, or I get
two pages – two pages is a great day. I think of that as a real
success. But I try not to trouble myself if I don't do so much – as
long as I'm working, I'm satisfied.

JC: It seems like you're making references to real life on the sly that sort of push past the frame of the book. At one point Perkus gets upset, and mid-rant he asks what happened to his friends -- he has a list of names that I'm pretty sure are real people.

JL: [laughs] Yeah, you're the first person to kind of poke at that. It's almost a running joke I had with myself. In this book, I didn't want there to have to be an acknowledgment, or there to be any epigraphs. The quotes that would ordinarily be epigraphs, or at the front of the chapters, like the James Baldwin quote – I wanted everything to be inside the book. I wanted it to be a container that could hold anything I wanted. There was some point at which I needed to name some friends for Perkus, and it served this marvelous double-purpose to tip my hat to a couple of people whose names, in some emotional way, belonged in the book. That more ordinarily would have been mentioned in an acknowledgments page that no one would read. But I decided I would go ahead and put them into the actual text.

JC: That's interesting, the thing that made me think the book was exploding outward, you stuck it in there so it could be fully contained.

JL: I think of the book as being like a kind of gigantic virtual reality, something self-enclosing and artificial, but that points to the real world every way it possibly can. Maybe it's like the whole of the Internet – I'm not trying to make a grandiose comparison for my novel. But I was thinking so much about Manhattan as a kind of virtual space, and popular culture as a gigantic diorama of ideas and responses – it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

I wouldn't say that it's a game that necessarily has to matter to anyone but me, but I was very excited -- in a way I stumbled into this. In "Fortress of Solitude," I need to write about the real history of popular music, the real history of soul and funk in the '60s and '70s. But I also need to pry it open, pry open a space in that real history and make room for my singer. I had to move Marvin Gaye two inches this way, and move the lead singer of the Temptations over this way about three inches, so there would be this vacancy where I could insert my fictional guy. That was necessity, but I became fascinated with the resulting texture in fiction that you get when you are splicing so intricately real and invented cultural stuff together. In "Chronic City," I was doing that not out of necessity but pleasure – this is a kind of fictional world-making that's really gotten transfixing for me, and I want to do tons of it, so there's a lot of microsurgery on that level, of what's real and what's fake.

JC: Because "Chronic City" is very layered and elliptical, I was
wondering what section you might pull out for a reading. But I see
you're doing a marathon reading of the book in NY, front to back, over
multiple nights and several weeks.

JL: So far, the two times that I've read it outside of this
marathon, I've just read the first chapter, which plays very well and
spares me the anxiety of needing to set up a lot of stuff. I think it’s
a lovely introduction to Chase and Perkus, who are the heart of the
book, their friendship.

The marathon thing came up – it started with reading my audiobook. I
was invited to be the actor for the audiobook of "You Don't Love Me
Yet." It was the first time I had ever done that – I sat in a recording
studio and read all of that book aloud in a two-day shot. It was really
an unusual experience. I'd never read one of my own novels cover to
cover. I felt like I learned all this stuff about the way it worked, a
couple of places I thought it flattened out more than I would have
liked. Of course it was too late, it was already in galleys and I
wasn't going to make any major changes. It meant that I promised myself
that with the next novel that I would find some way to read the
entirety of it aloud while it still could be reworked.

I did that last winter in a small town in Maine in January in this
little snowbound village where people were really bored so they were
very willing to sit and listen to me. I did it in eight nights over 10
or 12 days, it was a real marathon there-- in this tiny little library
in Maine.

It was what I hoped as an editorial experience. Trying to put the whole
thing across out loud is very very instructive, and I did learn a lot
of things that I wanted to know, and it affected the editing of
"Chronic City" strongly. But it was unexpectedly also a kind of deep
human experience, gathering these folks together and doing this thing.
It became this very intimate time we spent – it made me yearn for that,
some of that feeling, anyway, to be imparted to what can sometimes with
book touring be a slightly mechanical procedure.

I thought, let me see if I can read the whole book to people in New
York – I usually end up doing six or seven or eight events in New York.
Let's turn it into another front-to-back reading and see if I can
instill some of that more human feeling into the whole experience. It's
been pretty rewarding so far, but I'm way behind, I'm just absolutely
in the hole. The last night is designed to be a catch-all – the
bookstore is a very friendly local shop that is going to indulge me.
We'll bring in pizza and bottles of wine, and I've got some actors that
will come in and read parts of it for me when my voice flags.

JC: Because Chase is a former actor, was there anybody in your head who stood in his place?

JL: I'm very naïve about contemporary culture; often my points of reference are weirdly antique. I was always fascinated with the stars like Natalie Wood or Elizabeth Taylor – or Dean Stockwell, who was a child actor, or Roddy McDowell. Also, Michael J. Fox, or the Doogie Howser guy.

I wouldn't want to claim that Chase was secretly actually a really good actor, but I was thinking about – you know, Marlon Brando is in the book too, in a way. And I was thinking about the dilemma of the actor who is inside a script that's oppressive, or degrading -- and how do you resist that, how do you work against it. In a way, that was Brando's life story – the script of being Marlon Brando was not one he finally wanted to play out. So he started resisting it from within. Not to get too pat, but that's almost the thematic heart of the book – if contemporary life is like a bad script that's very difficult to get to the outside of, you're permanently cast in contemporary reality, can you express your resistance in the way you play the role? Can you express your integrity or your suspicious, can you abstain from within the role – or is the script too strong, are you just stuck? That's not just an actor's problem – it's life.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jonathan Lethem reads from "Chronic City" at the 2009 New Yorker Festival. Credit: Amy Sussman / Getty Images for The New Yorker